In today's cellular networks (2G/3G/4G), there is a tremendous demand for high data rate services such as video sharing, gaming, proximity-aware-social-networking, etc. However, the vulnerability of the cellular network to radio channel affects the performance of data services significantly. For an example, users at a cell edge, users with bad radio channel, users inside a lift or basement, etc., may not get a fair quality of service (QoS) experience compared to other users. While, in this process, the resource blocks (RBs) assigned to these users also gets underutilized or wasted. With the increase in mobile traffic and bandwidth demand, Device-to-Device (D2D) communication underlying Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks has gained tremendous interest by the researchers, cellular operators and equipment manufacturers.
A majority of existing solutions relies on the application of D2D communication only to emergency services. However, prior art literature has never explored the D2D communication in commercial applications. Prior art literature is also silent on commercial D2D offloading scheme for users who may be at cell edges, inside some isolated environments like basement or large buildings, or have a seriously bad channel. Prior art literature has never disclosed about discovering the available idle D2D neighbors for such bad channel users, and close proximity users can directly communicate among themselves bypassing eNodeB (eNB) and using the same cellular resources such as licensed spectrum, RBs associated with the same eNB and offload its data to the D2D neighbor. Some of the prior art literature vaguely describe about D2D communication, however, they are not be able to identify an offloading partner for data transmission among a plurality of available offloading partners.
Prior art literature have illustrated various method for device-to-device communication, however, device-to-device offloading in LTE networks is still considered as one of the biggest challenges of the technical domain.